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April 23, 2012

Adobe Aims For The Clouds With Latest Creative Suite

by editor

Graphic tool powerhouse Adobe has been busy lately with new products finding their way into customers hands as fast as can be. This week is the official kick-off of its latest design software, Creative Suite 6 (CS6) and it is full of goodies for creative types of all stripes.

“The urge to be creative is universal, and harnessing the creative spark — in everyone from school children to creative pros — has never been more important,” said Shantanu Narayen, Adobe´s president and CEO, in a statement. “Wherever and whenever inspiration strikes, Adobe will be there to help capture, refine and publish your ideas.”

Photoshop gets new design tools and extends its offering to support video clip editing. A new Blur filter section offers tilt-shift-style effects, the ability to blur everything with a single focal point, or vary the blurriness between multiple focal points, complete with on-image and in-context controls.

Previously, Photoshop CS6 was available for download as a free beta is expected to be on sale within a month, and is available to pre-order now. Photoshop CS6 is priced at $699 while Photoshop CS6 Extended is $999 and includes 3D graphic features, writes Darryl K. Taft for E-Week. Upgrade pricing will also be available for existing customers, though details are yet to be confirmed.

Adobe is also pleased to announce its addition of Adobe Creative Cloud. Creative Cloud integrates Adobe´s line of creative touch tools with CS6 desktop applications. Subscribers also will be able to easily deliver mobile apps to iOS and Android marketplaces and publish, manage and host websites.

In addition, Adobe Creative Cloud subscribers will have access to application upgrades, including new CS point-product features, before they are launched as part of major CS updates, as well as inventive new products and services as they emerge.

Membership in Creative Cloud is $49.99 per month, with an annual contract. And Adobe is offering a special introductory rate of $29.99 per month for CS3, CS4, CS5 and CS5.5 individual customers.

“What Adobe is doing with this release is a powerful case study in how to take a traditional rich desktop suite of software and build added value in cloud services,” Al Hilwa, an analyst with IDC, told Taft.

“Teams of designers and developers will be able to install and manage their software in the cloud as well as store their assets and publish them in the cloud, all while collaborating on their work.”

“These are the kinds of services that will make a subscription model compelling. The other noticeable change in this release is the degree to which Adobe is embracing HTML5. A variety of tools incorporate and leverage HTML5 in CS6 showing the broad scope of the transition Adobe is making.”